


Chwayatyun (The Rule of Two)

by dynata



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark Side Rey, F/M, Kylo Ren Angst, Sith Training, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:53:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24709402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynata/pseuds/dynata
Summary: Dzworokka yun; nyâshqûwai, nwiqûwai. Wotok tsawakmidwanottoi, yuntok hyarutmidwanottoi. — "Two there should be; no more, no less. One to embody power, the other to crave it."
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	1. Two there should be.

Suddenly, with an almighty screech, Rey’s future came tumbling loose.

Well, at least her next two weeks. An intact navicomp from an _Imperial_ -class Star Destroyer would surely earn her enough rations to last that long, even at Plutt’s outrageous prices. 

She caught the device hard against her chest, swaying precipitously on the tilted ledge of the control panel where she was perched. The valuable scrap had been neglected by other scavengers for its position at the nose of the Destroyer, which happened to be pointed at the sky. 

She tucked the navicomp into her makeshift rucksack and twisted carefully to regard the drop behind her. It had been a climb of perhaps a hundred and twenty metres from her speeder on the ground to her precarious position.

The descent would be easier. Over the years, she had developed a sixth sense for which footholds to search out, which handholds were dangerously rusted and which would hold fast under her meager weight. Carefully, she slipped between ledges and rappeled down drops, her quarterstaff strapped to her back. She landed hard from a particularly tricky leap, cushioning the rucksack with her body. 

As soon as she reached her speeder, she slipped the navicomp out of her bag. She pried open the hatch covering the bike’s power cell, threading out a couple of wires. Holding her breath, she connected the wires to the navicomp’s charging ports. 

The device hummed, then flickered. The blue glow of a boot-up sequence bathed her face, picking out one of her rare smiles in detail. A functional navicomp was the most valuable scrap she’d found in years.

It was a good thing, too. The black clouds that gathered at the edges of the horizon that morning promised a storm within the day cycle, and Rey knew from painful experience that the _X'us'R'iia_ could blow for days, blocking any attempt to venture outside of one’s shelter. 

She shrugged off the length of fabric that she kept slung over her shoulders to protect any valuable scrap, and carefully wrapped the navicomp in its folds. She tucked it back into the rucksack, closed up the power port, and straddled her speeder. 

*

Niima Outpost rose up fast from the horizon, shimmering in the midday heat. Rey slowed her speeder as she approached the outskirts of town, mindful of the dust kicked up by her repulsor engines. Weaving through the main street, she registered a commotion in the direction of the landing strip and veered down a side street. Visitors to the Outpost were few and far between, and most of them were nothing but trouble, gangsters and bounty hunters and the like.

She parked her bike at the edge of Plutt’s junkyard, near Old Traz’s lean-to, and took the ignition key and the spark plug with her for good measure—you never knew with thieves around here. 

Rey trudged across the sun-baked sand, taking shelter in the small pool of shade in front of Plutt’s trading window. The blobfish turned towards her, licking his fingers, and her stomach growled at the scent of real meat wafting off his plate of dumplings behind the barred window. 

“What have you got today, dunerat?” he asked, letting out a rancid burp.

Rey dug into her rucksack, removing the cloth bundle. She unwrapped it carefully, slinging the cloth wrapping back around her shoulders and holding up her treasure with both hands. Plutt eyed the navicomp with poorly concealed interest. 

“Sand in its circuits, no doubt?”

“Fully functional. Plug it in if you want.” Rey’s chest puffed out a bit with pride. 

“Six full portions.” His opening offer was half what the thing was worth, as usual.

“Ten.” Rey crossed her arms. 

“Seven.”

“Eight. And an extra water pouch.” Rey set her jaw. 

Plutt raised his eyebrows, but relented.

“Hand it over, girl.” His meaty fingers motioned for the device. 

She moved to pass it through the slot in his window when the hairs on the back of her neck prickled. She whipped her head around, reaching for the quarterstaff strapped to her back. There, in the distance, she spotted a strange, dark-robed figure, surrounded by the unmistakable forms of stormtroopers in full armor. Trouble. She knew it. 

She turned to Plutt, eyes wide, and shoved the navicomp at him. He looked at her strangely, but took it, sliding the ration packs and water pouch at her. She scooped them into her rucksack and slipped away down an alley, thoroughly spooked.

It was like the dead had come back walking. Those white plastoid helmets, buried in the sand, served as burial markers for their unfortunate owners in the Starship Graveyard. And there was that dark-robed figure, tall and imposing, like the whispered stories of old Lord Vader. It was unsettling, and Rey was ready to speed home and forget about the whole thing.

*

Home, at least for now, was the hollowed-out shell of the _Hellhound Two_ , an old AT-AT walker that had toppled sideways into a dune. Rey popped open the auxiliary hatch and eased her speeder inside, crawling in behind it. She stowed the cobbled-together bike in the leg of the walker, then slipped into the main cavity. 

Over the years she’d lined the walls with piles of junk, interspersed with transplanted spinebarrels and nightblooms in cracked cups of sand. Her bed was a hammock woven from sun-bleached flightsuits and frayed parachute cords, and she kept a fire pit in the corner for cooking and heat on the cold desert nights. 

Rey unstrapped the quarterstaff from her back and squatted in a corner. She opened her rucksack, letting her hard-earned rations slide out in a heap, and sighed in satisfaction. She scooped up a plastic packet, tearing into it with her teeth. She could barely wait for the recommended five minutes for the meal to rehydrate, luxuriating in the weight of veg-meat curry and rice in her palms. As soon as it was ready, she dug in, squeezing lumps of tough veg-meat, grainy sauce, and half-rehydrated rice onto her tongue. Her stomach bulged with half the portion down, and she knew if she kept going she’d be sick, so she set the rest aside for later.

*

As she scrambled about, bolting down openings and screwing shut hatches in advance of the coming storm, her mind kept wandering back to the strange visitors at Niima. She’d heard rumors of an Imperial Remnant hiding out in the Outer Rim, but what could they possibly want with Jakku? She imagined they were hunting down a fugitive, or searching out relics of the old Empire, or convening secret meetings with some pirate or bounty hunter passing through their forsaken corner of the Western Reaches.

Outside, the wind picked up. Howls and shrieks echo through the air, noises she knew then were the play of the wind against the strange, twisted shapes of the Starship Graveyard. As a child, she had thought the noises were beasts ravaging her shelter. She had always checked the outside for claw marks when the storm died down. 

It was dark inside, her fire burnt down to embers. She lay in her hammock, quarterstaff propped against the wall, ready to drift off to the sound of the storm.

Suddenly, and with an almighty screech, Rey’s door came tumbling off its hinges.

She bolted out of bed, quarterstaff in hand, and fell into a defensive crouch. A dark, hooded figure was blocking the moonlight, and the storm seemed to fade away around them, the wind barely ruffling their cloak. Rey slanted the weapon at the intruder, and they (slowly, deliberately) raised a hand. 

Rey felt a _thrum_ , like someone had struck a chord in her very core. Her ears filled with static, and her vision went dark.


	2. No more.

Rey awoke with a start. Her eyes flew open to a darkness so dense it seemed to press against her pupils. 

Disoriented, she felt the cold bite of metal at her wrists and ankles, and the hard surface against her back told her with certainty that she was not safe in her hammock at home. Adrenaline flooded her system, and she began to twist and pull against her restraints, swearing as their sharp edges drew blood. Her heart pounded, and a ringing hum began to fill her ears.

Wait. No. Her ears weren’t ringing. That was the sound of a starship engine in realspace.

She was in space.

Rey screamed.

The sound bounced around the room, piercing her eardrums, but she couldn’t stop. Her body started to shake. She fought uselessly with her restraints, and she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, couldn’t think. Because—because someone had taken her. Someone. That dark figure. And now she wasn’t on Jakku. But she _had_ to be on Jakku, every day, every minute, so they could find her again, so they could correct the mistake, so they could take her home. 

They. The two blurry figures in her treasured memories. The ones who had tied her hair into those three knots. Who had sung her to sleep with that half-remembered melody. Who had left her with the promise: I love you. And now that promise was broken, gone, because what if today had been the day? Or tomorrow, or the day after that, because who knew what her captor would do to her, when they would be done with her, where they would leave her—

Silently, suddenly, the lights came on.

Rey froze for a second, blinking at the blurry brightness, wondering if she was going blind, before she realized that her eyes were wet with tears. She turned her head to the side and let them drip across her nose and down her cheek. As her vision cleared, she realized that she was in a small, circular room with dark metal walls, strapped to some kind of table. The room was otherwise empty. She noted with some relief that she was still wearing her old clothes, though her staff and satchel were nowhere to be seen. 

Behind her, something made a small hiss, and then a quiet rumble. Soft footsteps told her that a door must have opened, and that someone (or some _thing_?) was coming in. 

“Well, would you look at what the loth-cat dragged in.” The voice was feminine, slightly nasal, and flatly dismissive. Rey strained her neck to see the newcomer, but the metal restraints bracketing her head kept the woman out of sight. 

“What do you want?” Rey tried to sound demanding, but her voice quavered halfway through, and she bit her lip in frustration.

“ _I_ don’t want anything with you. Frankly, I think this whole mission is a waste of time. But Lord Ren has been… insistent.” Rey thought she heard a slight, haughty laugh in the woman’s exhale. “So here we are.”

The whisper of fabric told Rey that the woman was moving just before she came into view. She was human, definitely, but there was something predatory in the way she moved. Her skin had the rich sheen of burnished wood, and her hair was stark white, bound back in elaborate braids. She wore dark, flowing robes with a simple cut but an expensive sheen. Most unsettling were her eyes, which were a flat, luminous yellow. Like a pole-snake’s.

Rey stared at her, doing her best to keep her face impassive. “Where are you taking me?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.” Despite the phrasing, it was not a question. Rey responded anyway.

“I would, actually—”

“Patience, _scavenger_.” The woman’s lips curled with disgust around the last word. She took a slow step forward, looming over Rey’s prone form.

If her mouth weren’t so dry, Rey thought wildly, she would have spit in the woman’s face. 

“Before you get where you’re going, it’s time to see where you’ve been.” The woman smiled delicately. “Nowhere interesting, I’m sure, but…” She raised a hand, as if she was going to caress Rey’s cheek. 

Instinctively, Rey cringed away. She heard the woman laugh softly, and then—

Pain. 

Her head split with it, like she’d been struck by lightning. Her vision went white, and Rey heard someone screaming, far away, someone who might have been herself. 

Half-formed imaged blurred through her mind’s eye, flashes of memories or maybe dreams, they went by so quickly she couldn’t tell. She felt a presence, dark and insistent, like foreign hands rifling through her head. It felt _wrong_. She felt the presence delving deeper, pressing in on her, until she thought her mind would be crushed.

Something deep inside her, clear and strong, said: _Push_. 

Rey didn't think. She didn't hesitate. She _pushed_. The presence faltered, and, encouraged, she pushed _harder_. The blur of images began to slow, and then fade. As if from a great distance, Rey felt her fingers curled into fists, the rawness of her throat, the sting of sweat in her eyes. She pushed towards the sensation, and with a gasp, her eyes snapped open. 

The woman’s hand grazed her cheek as she snatched it back. Her face was inscrutable.

Rey blinked, dizzy with exhaustion. She sagged against her restraints, fighting a losing battle with unconsciousness. After a few ragged breaths, everything went dark.

*

In the desert, the temperature was always your enemy. Sure, people knew about the heat of day, when every inch of skin needed to be hidden from the sun, and water became worth its weight in credits. But what most didn’t realize was that the cold of night was just as deadly, and more dangerous for it, seeping in as soon as the last rays of sun faded over the horizon. Children were known to freeze to death with a fresh sunburn.

Because of this, Rey was always sensitive to temperature. Which is why it was strange that, in this dream, she felt… nothing. More precisely, she felt some strange, rushing cold in her left arm, but other than that, no temperature, not even a breeze. Her unease increased as she realized she couldn’t even feel the warmth of her breath on her lips, or the cold of those awful metal restraints on her ankles and wrists. Bordering on panic, she forced herself awake.

Her eyes snapped open to a sea of glowing blue. She immediately gagged, feeling the hardness of something stiff stuffed down her throat, and raised her hands, comically slow through this blue… _stuff_ , to claw it out. Her fingers met a hard transparisteel shell, and she realized that there was some sort of mask attached to her face. Reaching out with her hands and feet, she felt the inside of a cylinder, slimy with blue gel. She felt herself beginning to panic, and took two slow, deep breaths, inhaling the smell of something sickly sweet. 

Wait. Blue, glowing, and sweet. A slow memory rose to the surface. When she was six and she’d gashed her shoulder on that first scrapping run. The little patch Old Traz had traded a week’s rations for. _Bacta._ She was in a bacta tank. Her head spun at the lavishness of the machine, at how many moons it would have kept her in rations, even scrapped for parts.

Rey looked down at her body, partially blurred by the blue goop. She was naked except for a strange chest wrap and shorts. She saw several thin lines leading out from the crook of her left elbow, up to the top of the enclosure. The cold, the dizziness, the slow cottony feeling in her head—they must be drugging her. She (slowly, too slowly) scrabbled at the lines with her right hand, fingers finding no purchase on the slippery surface. Gritting her teeth, she wound the lines once, twice around her right wrist, and pulled hard. The needles stung as they were yanked out of her skin, and her blood mixed with bacta to form a wispy purple cloud. 

Rey felt her heart start to race and her breathing speed up as the sedatives cleared her system. Faintly, she heard something start to beep a high, shrill tone. Clumsily, she paddled through the goop towards the top of the tube, but she could find no purchase on the lid. She beat her fists against the walls in desperation, biting back tears. There had to be a way out.

Shifting tactics, Rey curled into herself, then planted her feet on the wall behind her and splayed her hands on the wall in front, so that she was suspended a few feet up, parallel to the floor. She balled her right hand into a fist, and slammed it into the wall, punctuating each strike with a word.

“Let. Me. OUT.” The bacta glowed greedily around her split knuckles, and she switched hands, gritting her teeth. She was still weak, still exhausted. Her efforts were useless, but she gave a flurry of punches all the same. Finally, she had to admit that it wasn't working. Rey floated helplessly, her loose hair swirling around her. She wondered who had taken her three hair ties. Who had taken her clothes, her last remnants of home.

Her clothes. Rey realized belatedly that someone must have _stripped her_. Her cheeks burned with anger and shame. No one had ever seen her like that, unconscious and naked, totally defenseless. They had taken her home, her future, and now even her own _body_ away from her. She felt herself start to shake with anger, fear, and grief, and for the first time in six long years, tears welled.

In that moment, something deep inside her cracked.

Somehow, with a sound like a gunshot, so did the wall. 

Rey's head jerked up, and she shouted again, this time with a fierce delight. She struck the wall one final time. Cracks spiderwebbed all through the wall, and she pushed off with her feet, sailing through the transparisteel fragments and bacta goop and into free air. She dug her fingers into the sides of the mask covering the lower half of her face and yanked it off, pulling out the tube jammed down her throat with it. She vomited victoriously into the mess, and then whirled around, blinking bacta from her eyes. 

She was in what she assumed to be a ship's medbay, with various machines lining the walls, two empty cots, and one very surprised-looking FX-series medi-droid. Rey eyed the droid with what she felt to be a reasonable amount of distrust. She snatched up a nearby IV pole and whacked it against the wall once, twice, until the wheels snapped off with a satisfying _crack_. It would make a passable quarterstaff. She made for the door, keeping her eyes on the droid, which chirped out a weak “Intruder… alert…” but stayed tucked against the wall as she passed. She half-turned to keep an eye on it as she edged towards escape. 

Unfortunately, this led to her being taken by surprise as, just before she hit the operating switch, the door slid open to reveal a veritable mountain of a man. 

Rey let out a battle cry and swung hard at the man’s neck. He simply stood there as the staff connected, shooting up a hand to catch it on the backswing and ripping it easily from Rey’s grasp. She scrambled backwards, and promptly lost her footing in a patch of bacta slime. She recovered in time to be caught squarely in the chest by a right hook that quite literally knocked the breath out of her. Doubled over and wheezing, she braced herself for another blow. 

It didn’t come.

She looked up at the man with apprehension. He looked back at her with bemusement.

“You could have waited until we were done healing you to try a stunt like that.” His voice was gruff but oddly warm. Rey felt that she preferred him over the viper woman, at least.

“Very spunky, but not very bright, dunerat.” He chuckled to himself. Rey quickly reversed her opinion. Her chest still hurt, and she could only draw shallow breaths. 

“Anyway, I was sent here by His Lordship to fetch you to your chambers, so it’s just as well that you’re up.” He gestured to the door, stepping aside. 

Rey felt a strange sense of unreality, but she straightened up as best she could and, glancing between the man and the door, decided her best option was to follow his lead. She shuffled gracelessly past him and stepped outside. The hallway was long and white, and mostly featureless. She realized with a jolt that she didn’t hear the hum of engines anymore, that the ground felt too still beneath her feet. They must have made planetfall. Was she even still on the ship?

“Left,” the man grunted from behind her.

She considered running to the right. She glanced back at the man, then down at her bare feet, still slick with bacta gel. Resigned, she turned left.

*

They walked for perhaps five minutes, Rey comparing their twists and turns to the layouts of the ships that she knew so well. It was big enough that they had to be on a star destroyer, but the angles of the hallways were all wrong. Maybe they weren’t on a ship at all. Rey contemplated if it was better or worse to be at her final destination. Worse, she decided, because being planetbound in some prison on some strange world meant almost no chance of ever finding her way home.

Lost in her musing, she almost missed it. The rectangle of light on the floor, cast at an angle. Sunlight. A _window_. If she could just get a look at the outside... She swerved down that hall, making it two steps, three, catching a flash of blue sky and a glimpse of something green—

Her ankles collided with some unseen barrier midstride, and she came crashing face-first to the floor. 

“Cardo, really? You ought to be more careful with your charges.” A familiar feminine voice reached Rey’s ears, and she tensed, freezing in place.

“Ah, I knew you had it under control,” came the gravelly response.

“Lazy as always, I see. And she’s no longer my responsibility, as you might recall.” The woman was crisply disinterested. 

Rey pushed herself up on her elbows and rubbed her chin, certain she sported a nasty bruise. A massive hand encircled her upper arm, and she found herself yanked into the air before being dropped back on her feet.

“Look, good as new. Happy?” asked the man—Cardo, she thought she’d heard the viper woman call him. Rey yanked her arm from his grasp, and stood tensely, trying to peer out the window without moving her head. She could see nothing but the corner of a dark cloud before the woman leaned casually against the sill, blocking her view completely.

There she was again, staring into those yellow eyes.

“Run along now.” The woman smiled. It did not touch those eyes.

Cardo clamped a hand on Rey’s shoulder. “Right.” He turned her around and gave her a shove that sent her reeling. 

“Three doors down, and stop.” Rey stumbled to a halt.

“This is you.” Cardo did something behind her back, and a door ground open.

“In.” Rey set her shoulders, turned, and stepped inside.

Lights flickered on over a small, rectangular cell. There was a metal ledge a few feet off the ground that seemed intended to serve as either a bed or a table and nothing else. She turned to Cardo, opening her mouth (though not sure what to say), but found the door sliding shut in her face.

“Hey!” She pounded on the smooth surface. “Let me out!”

“Do you really think that would work?” came the faint reply.

Rey thought fast. “Could I at least clean myself off?”

She heard footsteps, getting fainter. She slid to the floor with a groan. However, a few moments later, she heard the footsteps returning. She scrambled up, pressing her back to the wall next to the door. The door slid open, something was tossed inside, and it slammed shut. She didn’t even get a chance to look out. Rey walked over to the bundle and discovered it to be a rag wrapped around a single water pouch. She shrugged. This was the kind of bath she was used to.

*

Being trapped in a featureless cell was incredibly boring, and this was coming from a girl who grew up in a featureless desert. By her estimation it had been at least half an hour since she had been left there. She had bathed, which had taken about five minutes, and then scoured the seams in the walls, floor, and (as close as she could reach) ceiling for any points of weakness. That had taken about twenty minutes. Then she had hidden the empty water pouch away in the folds of her chest wrap, and sat down to count to one thousand. That had taken about eight minutes. 

Now she was listening at the door for any signs of movement. She was sitting as silently as she could, breathing softly, not moving. She could hear the soft hum of electricity, the distant groan of some kind of machinery, and even the skittering of a wheeled droid passing by. 

She closed her eyes, as if that would help her listen harder. She was, honestly, exhausted, and the cool hardness of the metal pressed against her was the only thing keeping her alert. But she couldn’t let her guard down. The man, Cardo, could return any minute—she was “his responsibility” now, wasn’t she? Or the viper woman, with her cold smile and her strange power to penetrate the mind. 

Wait—there. Was that a footstep? Yes. And another. Steady, deliberate. Getting louder. It could be someone just passing by, but no, it was definitely getting closer, coming towards her. It didn’t sound heavy enough for the man, nor soft enough for the woman. Some new torturer coming to lay their claim?

Rey scrambled back from the door when she was sure the stranger was in her hall. 

She stood, defiant, as the footsteps stopped in front of her door.

She narrowed her eyes and balled her fists as the door ground open.

She froze in place as a dark, hooded figure filled her doorway.


End file.
